Stinkbugs are creatures but I hate them

A green stink bug on a leaf. This is not what the stink bugs on my ceilings look like, because those stink bugs are ugly.

I've been out with a cold the last couple of days, which has strengthened the adhesive between me and my couch. A little game I like to play while I'm on the couch is, "how many fucking stinkbugs are on the ceiling. Currently, the answer is five if you count the lights. Then I look at the wall hangings (seven), appliances (four), and my fucking laptop (two). Ew.

They weren't always around, were they? I remember cicadas and shit in my childhood, and mosquitoes, and all other kind of bugs, but not stink bugs. There's too many of them to really fight too much.

Fuck these insects. I don't really have anything else even mildly clever to say, I just hate them.

Fuck getting places: directions suck

Part of an old hand-drawn map, dating from about 1840, author unknown, showing Portobello, Dublin, and environs. From Wikipedia.

I fucking hate directions. No matter how simple, no matter how straightforward, left alone, I will fuck them up and get lost for a half hour. One must literally draw me a map to ensure I arrive somewhere in a reasonable time frame. And sometimes, even that doesn't work. Unless I live or work there, I do not know how to get there.

Yesterday, I picked up and dropped my friend off at her house. This friend is a good friend, and one of few faithful readers of this blog (hey girl, hey). I've been to her house at least a dozen times over the years, and at least a half a dozen times since the beginning of this year.

But since I can get lost in the simplest of situations, I still had to call her and ask her "okay, so right at the McDonalds, right?" It's probably rude - sorry, girl - but I didn't think of it that way. Rather, I thought of it as not wasting a fucking hour of our time getting hopelessly lost and frustrated, because even though she lives in my very small hometown, even though I've taken the same route to her house at least a dozen times, I'm still too fucking obtuse to find her house without her holding my cellular hand.

I love driving, but I cannot do it for a long period of time in new areas unless my partner gets all patriarchal by my request and tells me when to take a left, and then vigilantly ensures that I do not take a right. Geography and the simplest of directions, down to right vs. left, give me mega anxiety. I've gotten lost a number of times in my life - too many to count, really, but here are a few that stick out in my head.

• two blocks from my childhood house while coming home from elementary school through a slightly different route (ran home crying)
• my high school best friend's house the single time I did not go with a crude but detailed map (went 13 miles over the speed limit and cried to a cop)
• on the way to my boyfriend of two years' house (was actually basically on the right path but still freaked and ended up crying on the phone to him)

As I left my friends, she gave me very simple instructions consisting of no more than two rights and two lefts and maybe two stop signs. It turned into a half-hour excursion through my town's backroads that ended up on the other side of town.

But I made it home, eventually, once I found Main Street. And I didn't cry. And when I am trying to assume the awesome responsibility of escorting myself to my destination, sometimes not crying is all the victory I need.

The New York Times: newspaper of record (for rich people)

The New York Times is all over this economic crisis!

Such an immediate and important and of the moment problem: what do you eat if you have limitless money? I know these are the questions that keep me up at night.

Gotta love this quote from the actual piece too:

Money is not an issue! I love that phrase. It comes up in my correspondence more often than you might think.

Wealth is totes awesome, right?

Bathrobes kick ass.

Fuck clothes.

If you are my boyfriend or one of my college friends, you know that I am not a huge fan of getting dressed when it is not absolutely necessary. And the only time that it is absolutely necessary is when I leave the house.

I mean, they’re fun to put on when I have to put them on. But unless I need it for warmth (note: I do not presently need it for warmth), I see no reason to cover up. I living in the fucking mountains. No one is peeping on me. I frequently water my plants in my underwear, and I’ve gotten approximately zero pushback on this thus far.

If I haven’t returned from work? If I’m not “entertaining”? Fuck it, I’m naked. Bodies are awesome. My body is awesome. There is nothing more comfortable than fucking skin.
And the perfect accessory to nudity on a weekday morning is a bathrobe. I haven’t had mine for a few months because I’m a lazy jackass who couldn’t be bothered to dig it out of a pile. But this weekend I cleaned it, and oh what a good decision that was. I’ve been in it (or nothing) pretty much about 75% of the time since.

Bathrobes kick ass. Remind me never to lose mine again.

Really, I don’t get the big deal about sandwiches

Man, fuck sandwiches.

For whatever reason, people on the internet love them some sandwiches. Jessica from Go Fug Yourself talks of them frequently. I remember the first time I heard about Twitter, it was framed as “hey there’s this service where people make short updates about sandwiches mainly!”

Yes, different varieties and combinations of vegetables, meat, condiments, and frequent though not necessary cheese between two slie of bread is quite a thing on the Internet. Mayo, turkey, lettuce, tomatoes, beef, provalone, pickles, mozzerella, mustard, onions, between rye, wheat, sourdough. Et cetera. Okay, I’m getting the point. Lots of good stuff, lots of different stuff.

Perhaps I’m unfairly prejudiced against sandwichs. But they’re just not that tasty to me. They get soggy, and spill out the sides, and just don’t come out right in my mouth.



See? The fuck am I going to take all those damn sprouts in my mouth at once? No mustard or anything, shit.

I just don't get it. All the component parts are there. Love meat. Love veggies. Love love love bread. Love condiments (particularly mayo). But together, it's just not that tasty to me.

I’m not saying I can’t get down with a grilled cheese every so often. But most of the time? No, thanks, stuff-in-bread. Whatever, sandwiches.

All photos from scanwiches

Internalized sexism and cleaning.

Image: Soap on a tub. Useless, guilt-inducing soap.

Y'all know that I am not averse to attributing things to THE SEXISM/PATRIARCHY/KYRIARCHY IF I'M FEELING ALL INTERSECTIONAL. And normally, if I'm feeling guilty about something that LADIES ARE SUPPOSED TO DO, I attribute it to good old internalization.

But right now I am feeling guilty about my messy-ass home as my boyfriend tidies, and that has nothing to do with internalized anything, except maybe laziness. It's nothing to do with "why can't the MAN clean up once in a while?" It's more of a "why can't RMJ pick up after herself like a competent adult once in a while?"

My boyfriend is presently bustling around like a busy fucking bee, picking shit up and asking me where the shit I've left around the house goes (to which I shrug and say "I don't know, I'm writing."). He's doing his damn part. He wants to end this mess. He wants to walk on clean floors and he wants it now, and for some mysterious reason, he expects that I'm going to eventually help.

This pattern, of me being a lazy jackass while some lovely Virgo cleans shit up around me, is long-standing. It dates back to childhood, when my mother would ask me to do some simple task like sort the recycling while she cooked dinner and mopped and set the table and loaded the dishwasher. Being lazy and entitled, I would sigh and moan and do whatever it was I did to procrastinate before I dicked about on the Internet, pretty much until the milk bottles and Kix boxes and multitudes of Diet Pepsi, known in our home as "DP" (haaaaaaaaaaaa) fell out the container.

I mean, I have a legitimate reason (note: I don't feel like it is basically my reason) to not help my partner out. I'm not just being a lazy partner (note: I am actually kind of lazy, no lie). See, he put on Metallica, and cleaning to Metallica gives me a goddamn headache. I want to clean to Lady Gaga.

I know I bitch a lot about cleaning. Clearly I hate it. Clearly nothing is going to make me like that shit. Cleaning sucks. I rarely get satisfaction from it (because, well, I rarely do a good job at it). But Lady Gaga helps! It's nice to be able to shake one's booty to distract one's self from the fucking pile of dishes in front of one.

Ugh, and there is Pokerface. Time to go do some fucking dishes.

Eloise fucking Hawking: fucking time travel, she knows how it works. (Fuck).

Of all the things that the Lost finale did not wrap up, I am most fucking pissed about Eloise Hawking. I love Eloise Hawking.

Image description: A completely badass older white woman, Eloise Hawking, with fierce white hair tells some likely-time-traveling douchebag what the fuck is up

That lady knew what the fuck was going on at all times, and on a show that basically can't write women well and where mothers in particular are evil and crazy, that was pretty fucking refreshing. She embodied mysterious sci-fi Lost at its best. Eloise is symbolic of the lost (HAHA I AM SO GOOD AT PUNS) promise of the sci-fi-free sixth season. She was the only one who understood fucking everything. Whatever happened, she basically reacted with "CALLED IT!"

I mean, the lady fucked shit up, don’t get me wrong. She’s not exactly my role model (note: she kind of is my role model, as far as women on Lost go). Like, she did some Jedi mind-trick on Desmond where she made him not propose to Penny, which is sad and all but also fucking cool. She cold shot her own son, which sucks and all. (but it was awesome when Widmore whined and she was like "fuck you I shot my son").

You want to talk sacrifice, Jack "It's Raining On My Face" Shephard? Or John "Destiny, fucking DESTINY" Locke? Eloise Hawking killed her son, raised him to be a doomed fucking genius, then sent him back just to make sure she would shoot him again.

Christ, Eloise was so fucking awesome. She told people where to go and what to do and how long they had to do it, and when they (read: Ben and Fucking Jack) whined about it, she was like "well, shit, I did my fucking part of the work, chop chop." She swam through caves with nuclear bombs. That is not a fucking exaggeration.

Eloise Fucking Hawking was a bullshit-detecting machine - a quality most characters on this show (like Jack "This Is A Totally Normal Island, Yay Science" and later "Sure, Let's Blow Up This Atomic Bomb" Shephard or John "Yeah, Let's Trust The Con-Man Who Stole My Liver" Locke) lacked in pretty much every situation. But that lady? She knew when people were from the future when even Richard fucking Alpert was like “Oh, US Army? Right this way!” She was the only fucking person who seemed like she knew what the fuck was going on in season five. Fucking time travel, how does it work? Eloise fucking knows.

That's the thing about fucking Eloise Hawking. She knows what the fuck is happening with this Lost bullshit. She fucking knows. Better than fucking Jack, or fucking Hurley, or even fucking Jacob's stupid ass. Eloise Hawking? Has got a handle on this time-travel situation.

Eloise fucking Hawking is so fucking awesome that she could have save the sixth fucking season. As I've said before, with less foul language, I liked the finale but shit where was the fucking science this season. In one fucking scene - one fucking scene - I bet Eloise could have explained the whole goddamn mess. She could have been like "look, Jack" or "look, Hurley" or "look, Desmond" or even fucking "look, Charles" and just laid shit out. Yeah, maybe it would have been a little exposition heavy, but Finoula fucking Finnigen could pull it the fuck off, no matter how fucking shitty and clunky the dialogue was (and it would have been hella shitty and clunky).

Or you know, if Darlton wanted to be awesome (note: they don't), they could give her her own fucking episode. God. Think about how awesome it would be to have an episode about that badass fucking women with all the badass fucking women who played her. She could have faced off with Jacob and been like “look, asshole, I need some answers right fucking now.” And Jacob could have explained things to a point where they made sense beyond “hey guys, God is cool, but we’re all going to die, so, here’s heaven”. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be at least as good as Ab Aeterno and it would at least go beyond the magic fucking light cave in explaining what the fucking show was about.

Okay, I've realized that from the amount of time I've written "cold somehow fucked up poor sweet Daniel Faraday" that she's not a great mother. Yeah. You know what, fine, yeah, she was a kind of shitty mom. And she kept Des and Penny apart. Yeah, that sucks. Every character on Lost does shitty things.

But you know what else? Most every woman on the show to be a shitty fucking abandoning-ass mother in one way or another (even if it’s not really their fault, WHATEVER WHATEVER that’s for another post). Why would Eloise be any fucking different? And you know what else? Some women have more fucking important things to worry about than being a good mother. Being a good mother is fucking awesome. I had an awesome mom, and I one day hope to be an awesome mom.

But Eloise fucking Hawking had more than Daniel Fucking Faraday to fucking worry about. Bitch had to prioritize. You know what's more important than Daniel fucking Faraday? Two of her other little responsibilities - namely space and fucking time.